'This feeling... it's subtle, but it's there.'
Ayanokoji narrowed his eyes, taking in the sight before him — a colony of creatures that could only be described as an inverted, living rendition of The Scream, filling the air with a sound like shrieking cicadas.
The faint, iron-edged taste of blood still pulsed from the wound inside his cheek, each throb a small, sharp anchor driving itself into his cerebral cortex.
He still didn't know exactly what these things were.
But the gap in his memory — the fracture that had been sitting there, raw and unresolved — had finally, quietly knit itself back together.
I've seen them before... Was it today? Just a moment ago?
Ayanokoji was certain of it.
He was a rational person. He didn't waste energy on internal noise. And in his memory, today was the only day that could be called genuinely extraordinary.
If zombies had already shown up, what was so strange about adding a memetic creature capable of blocking — or outright rewriting — human cognition?
That was science, after all.
The constant assault on common sense. The relentless pushing of every boundary, the transcendence of every limit thought to be fixed.
The cicada-shriek cut off without warning.
The Silence that had been hanging upside down beneath the water tower unfolded themselves, one by one, and dropped to stand upright on the rooftop. Their faces were unreadable — features blurred beyond definition — but the arrogance warping those almost-faces was perfectly legible. Contempt for humanity, written in every line of them. The disdain of something that looks down from a great height and sees nothing worth acknowledging.
The largest one — towering above the rest — tilted its head slightly downward, sweeping its gaze across the group of humans clutching their strange black weapons. It showed no urgency whatsoever.
"Humans."
"Tell me your purpose."
Ryuuen Kakeru's brow was drawn tight — but he answered anyway.
"Purpose?" He bared his teeth. "To send every last one of you freaks straight to hell. Obviously."
The moment the words left his mouth, the countdown he'd been running silently in his head hit zero.
Everyone had had long enough to charge up. Ryuuen shed the brief, off-kilter unease without another thought and squeezed the trigger.
Whatever these things were — striking first was never the wrong call.
"Move!!"
The battle cry rang across the rooftop.
The decision was decisive, the execution ruthless — but that war declaration, honestly, was a little redundant.
Something's wrong.
Hypnosis? Some kind of subliminal compulsion?
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka caught the wrongness immediately.
The ability to influence a person's subconscious in an instant — to nudge them into speaking — was that it? Was that the ability that made me forget?
He registered Ryuuen Kakeru's provocative declaration. He registered the Kabane that had been toying with the Silence moments before, now vanishing one by one into columns of light, swept away by the volley of beams from above.
And he watched as The Silence, for the first time, seemed to find them mildly interesting.
"Hnngg — HHNNGG——!!"
They spread their arms wide. Arcs of electricity danced and crackled at their fingertips, and they let out a piercing shriek — the sound of something utterly certain of its own superiority, laughing at insects who didn't know their place.
Unfortunately for them, the laughing didn't last long.
Ichinose Honami. Yamada Albert. The others had already finished charging.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Multiple invisible gravity blasts tore through the air in rapid succession, the space around each one warping visibly as they crossed the rooftop and slammed into the Silence's frail, undefended torsos.
SPLAT ——!
For all their grandeur — the ability to command lightning, to rewrite what a human mind remembered — their bodies were tissue paper.
Several of The Silence were still mid-laugh, heads thrown back in mockery, when their skulls detonated like overripe watermelons and painted the rooftop in a fine crimson mist.
Not everyone had gone for lethal shots — the X-GUN wasn't every group member's weapon of choice — and so a handful survived the opening salvo.
Those survivors didn't fare much better. Two streaks of pale blue laser netting closed around them in an instant, pinning them where they stood.
The tide had turned completely.
In the span of seconds, the vast rooftop had been reduced to a single standing figure: the tallest of The Silence, their leader, isolated and alone at its center.
At that moment, the last of the Kabane finished transmitting. A chime from the Black Sphere rang in everyone's ears simultaneously.
[Target count reduced.]
[Mission complete.]
The surviving Silence seemed to understand what that meant.
It raised one hand, slowly. Those pale, slender fingertips began pulling electricity together — coiling it, concentrating it into something blinding.
"Humans..."
"This power was never meant to belong to you."
Then its voice dropped — lower, heavier, threaded with a resonance that made the air itself feel wrong, that sent a wave of vertigo rolling through the skull:
"Miserable crawling vermin. What you should be—"
"—is quiet."
The words were barely out of its mouth when Ayanokoji Kiyotaka had already hurled the improvised firebomb directly at it.
"Don't let it finish that sentence!"
The Silence faltered — genuinely caught off guard that someone had seen through it so quickly.
Even so, the instincts of a superior being moved faster than surprise.
"You dare."
A flick of its fingers. The electrical current launched from its fingertips and shattered the firebomb mid-flight.
A brilliant bloom of fire erupted in the air — alcohol and glass shards scattering outward like a burst of fireworks, beautiful and lethal at once.
The current punched through the flame. It was milliseconds from reaching the group.
And that was when Chris — who had been monitoring the entire scene through the Omniscient Eye — finally moved.
The moment his first foot left the ground, the world pressed pause.
Sparks hung suspended in midair. The arcing electricity stopped mid-leap, frozen in place between one instant and the next.
Chris stepped through it calmly and planted his foot.
Then took a second step.
Time resumed.
0.1 seconds.
Time stopped again.
Then resumed. Then stopped.
Three steps total. Three flashes of frozen time, each one a fraction of a second apart.
To everyone watching — everyone except Chris himself — he had simply blinked across the rooftop. Three consecutive flashes, like hitting a dash key three times in a row, and he was standing directly behind The Silence.
The black blade described a clean arc.
The creature's head left its shoulders and traced a long, slow arc through the night air.
Chris didn't stop moving.
Using the momentum of the swing, he turned his wrist, extending the blade's path in a fluid continuation — and drew it cleanly across the neck of one of the Silence still pinned in the laser netting nearby.
Thud.
Two heads hit the rooftop floor at nearly the same instant.
Only then did Chris finally slow down. He turned his head, unhurried, toward Kamuro Masumi — who was standing not far away with the expression of someone whose brain had temporarily disconnected from her body.
"What are you standing around for?" he said. "We're about to get sent back. Go clean up the last ones."
"Huh? Oh — oh, right!"
Kamuro Masumi snapped back to reality, fumbled her Y-GUN up, and squeezed the trigger.
Several laser beams swept across the remaining Silence's heads one by one, confirming the kills. The moment the last scan completed, the glow beneath everyone's feet began to rise — the telltale shimmer of the transport sequence starting.
It was only then, in the sudden quiet that followed, that everyone else on the rooftop managed to pull themselves together.
"That was..."
Sakayanagi Arisu's eyes were alive with something that looked very much like genuine fascination, the calculating gleam behind them brighter than usual.
"Is that the Gantz Suit's true potential?"
That speed. That explosive output. Every metric pushed so far past the human ceiling it had ceased to be a meaningful comparison.
If she had a body that could use that kind of power...
If this frail, failing frame of hers could...
"HA!"
Ryuuen Kakeru slammed his fist down, barely containing himself, and swore under his breath:
"Nothing in that damn Black Sphere is ever simple, is it?!"
If he'd known the suit was that broken, he never would've handed those points over to Ichinose. Not a chance.
He felt it now — a genuine, physical ache in his chest. Like watching money walk out the door.
Those points should have been his. They were supposed to be his. This was practically a crime.
Ichinose Honami, for her part, felt nothing like jealousy.
She was simply, sincerely glad that everyone had made it through alive. All of them.
Thinking that, she remembered something — and turned her head, searching the shadows at the edge of the rooftop until she found Ayanokoji Kiyotaka standing quietly in the corner.
"Um... I'm sorry to ask this of you."
"The exam is over, so the barrier downstairs should be gone by now."
"When you take Hirata-kun to the nurse's office... could you pass along a message for me? To Amikura-san?"
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka brought his attention back to the present — pulling his gaze away from the black blade still in Chris's hand.
"Sure," he said, his voice even.
"What's the message?"
Ichinose Honami pressed her lips together for a moment.
"Just... tell her..."
"I'm sorry. I couldn't protect anything."
The blue light surged.
Ichinose Honami's silhouette dissolved into the brightness and disappeared — leaving only the trailing echo of those words, soaked in regret, carried away by the night wind.
The rooftop fell empty.
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka stood there, alone, a faint crease between his brows as he looked around at the vacant space surrounding him.
...Why am I up here?
Did I... forget something?
____
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